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Story of a Modern Woman / Edition 1

Story of a Modern Woman / Edition 1

by Ella Hepworth Dixon
Story of a Modern Woman / Edition 1
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ISBN-10:
1551113805
ISBN-13:
2901551113806
Pub. Date:
01/14/2004
Publisher:
Story of a Modern Woman / Edition 1

Story of a Modern Woman / Edition 1

by Ella Hepworth Dixon

Overview

Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman originally appeared in serial form in the women’s weekly The Lady’s Pictorial. Like Hepworth Dixon herself, the novel’s heroine Mary Erle is a woman writer struggling to make her living as a journalist in the 1880s. Forced by her father’s sudden death to support herself, Mary Erle turns to writing three-penny-a-line fiction, works that (as her editor insists) must have a ball in the first volume, a picnic and a parting in the second, and an opportune death in the third.

This Broadview edition’s rich selection of historical documents helps contextualize The Story of a Modern Woman in relation to contemporary debates about the “New Woman.”

Product Details

ISBN-13: 2901551113806
Publication date: 01/14/2004
Pages: 295
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Steve Farmer teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature at Arizona State University, Tempe. He is the editor of the Broadview editions of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1996) and The Moonstone (1999).

Read an Excerpt


CHAPTER VIII. A KETTLEDRUM AT LADY Lady Jane Ives was always to be found in Portman Square at five, but to-day she had sent out cards, so that au hour later the lofty, gaunt rooms, with their faded crimson carpets, their flowery chintzes, and their many mirrors, were dotted with little groups. Lady Jane disliked new fashions in her house, and the general effect, in an over- luxurious age, was somewhat cheerless. The stiff, hard Guardis on the walls, in which tin gondoliers were propelling iron gondolas on a leaden lagoon, with a background of grey zinc palaces, were but faintly visible by the tentative light of the circle of candles in the quivering lustre chandelier. Between the starched lace curtains stood monster Chinese vases, swollen like vases seen in an uneasy dream. The buhl cabinets had chilly marble tops; the rosewood tables held vast photograph albums. Lady Jane had arranged therooms on her marriage some forty years ago, and it had not occurred to her to change them. Parliament had just opened; people were back in town. Here and there a man's black coat was visible. There was a subdued murmur of talk. People were slipping out quietly under cover of someone else's arrival, dropping the perfunctory smile which they had exhibited for ten minntes under the lustre chandelier, as they made their way quickly out into the portico, where a small army of grooms, with faces as drab and unemotional as their overcoats, hung about the steps. " I've just come from the Ambassador of all the Russias," drawled a pretty woman to Lady Jane, as she stood, in the swaggering attitude which she affected on entering a drawing-room, just at the door. " My dear, you shouldn't encourage thosebarbarians," declared her hostess, "it's so shockingly radical to approve of foreign tyrann...

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Ella Hepworth Dixon: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

The Story of a Modern Woman

Appendix A: Contemporary Reviews of The Story of a Modern Woman

  1. From W.T. Stead’s Review of Reviews, vol. 10, 1894
  2. The Athenæum, 16 June 1894
  3. The Times, 30 June 1894
  4. The New York Times, 10 June 1894
  5. The New York Tribune, 11 October 1894
  6. The Westminster Review, vol. 142, 1894
  7. The Critic, 9 March 1895

Appendix B: 1883 Map of London and Locations Mentioned in the Novel

Appendix C: Victorian Fear at the End of the Century: The “New Woman” Debate

  1. Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” 1894
  2. From Ouida’s “The New Woman,” 1894
  3. “Character Note: The New Woman,” 1894
  4. From Ella W.Winston’s “Foibles of the New Woman,” 1896
  5. From Hugh Stutfield’s “Tommyrotics,” 1895
  6. From Hugh Stutfield’s “The Psychology of Feminism,” 1897

Appendix D: The New Woman as “Wild Woman”: The Exchange between E.L. Linton and Mona Caird

  1. From Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Wild Women as Politicians,” 1891
  2. From Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents,” 1891
  3. From Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Partisans of the Wild Women,” 1892
  4. From Mona Caird’s “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women’,” 1892

Appendix E: Marriage

  1. From Mona Caird’s “Marriage,” 1888
  2. Ella Hepworth Dixon, “Why Women Are Ceasing to Marry,” 1899

Appendix F: Literary Censorship in Victorian England

  1. From George Moore’s Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals, 1885
  2. Walter Besant, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Thomas Hardy, “Candour in Fiction,” 1890

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